that was not paint, and every one went into ecstasies and exclaimed
and wondered if it was possible that it was really he, Théodore de
Sérannes, the daring horseman, the consummate duellist, the determined
hunter, and if they could be perfectly sure that it was not his twin
sister.
"Why, you would have said he had never worn any other costume in his
life! he is not in the least embarrassed in his movements, he walks
very well and doesn't stumble over his train; he plays with his eyes
and fan to perfection; and such a slender figure he has!--you could
clasp it with your fingers!--It's a most extraordinary thing! it's
unconceivable!--The illusion is as complete as possible: one would
almost say that he has a bosom, his neck is so fat and well filled out;
and not a single hair of beard, not one; and how soft his voice is! Oh!
what a lovely Rosalind! who would not be her Orlando?"
Aye--who would not be Orlando to such a Rosalind, even at the price
of the torments I suffered?--To love as I loved with a monstrous,
unavowable passion, which, however, one cannot uproot from his heart;
to be condemned to maintain the most profound silence and not to dare
to say what the most prudent and respectful lover would say without
fear to the most prudish and rigid of women; to feel one's self
consumed by an insensate flame, unjustifiable even in the eyes of the
most confirmed libertines;--what are ordinary passions beside that--a
passion which is shameful in itself and hopeless, and, which, even in
the improbable event of its success, would be a crime and would kill
you with shame? To be reduced to hope for failure, to dread favorable
chances and opportunities, and to avoid them as another would seek
them--such was my fate.
The most profound discouragement had taken possession of me; I viewed
myself with horror mingled with surprise and curiosity. The thing that
shocked me most was the thought that I had never loved before, and that
this was the first effervescence of my youth, the first daisy of my
springtime of love.
In my case this monstrosity replaced the refreshing, modest illusions
of adolescence; my dreams of tender affection, so fondly cherished
as I walked at evening on the edge of the woods, through the narrow
blushing paths, or along the white marble terraces beside the lake in
the park, were to be metamorphosed into this deceitful sphinx with the
equivocal smile, the ambiguous voice, before whom I stood speechless,
afraid to undertake the solution of the enigma! To interpret it falsely
would have caused my death; for alas! it is the only bond that attaches
me to the world; when it is broken, all will be over. Take that gleam
of light away from me and I shall be more silent and inanimate than
the embalmed mummy of the first of the Pharaohs. At the moments when
I felt most violently drawn toward Théodore, I threw myself back in
dismay into Rosette's arms, although I had an indescribable feeling
of repulsion for her; I tried to place her between Théodore and myself
as a shield and barrier--and when I lay beside her, I felt a secret
satisfaction in the thought that she at all events was unquestionably a
woman, and that, even if I did not love her, she still loved me enough
to prevent our liaison from degenerating into intrigue and debauchery.
I felt in my heart, however, through it all, a sort of regret at being
thus unfaithful to the idea of my impossible passion; I blamed myself
for it as for an act of treachery, and although I was well aware that
I should never possess the object of my love, I was displeased with
myself, and was cold to Rosette once more.
The rehearsal was much more successful than I hoped; Théodore,
especially, was admirable; the others thought that I, too, acted
extremely well.--It is not that I have the essential qualities of
a good actor, and it would be a very great mistake to think that I
am capable of taking other parts in the same way; but, by a strange
chance, the words I had to say fitted in so well with my situation,
that it seemed to me as if I had written them rather than learned them
by heart from a book.--If my memory had failed me for a moment, I
certainly should not have hesitated before filling the void with an
improvised phrase. Orlando was myself quite as much as I was Orlando,
and it is impossible to imagine a more extraordinary coincidence.
In the scene with the wrestler, when Théodore took the chain from his
neck and gave it to me, as the play requires, he bestowed a glance on
me so soft and languorous, so full of promise, and he pronounced with
such grace and nobility of utterance the phrase: "Gentleman, wear this
for me; one out of suits with fortune; that could give more but that
her hand lacks means,"--that I was really confused, and was hardly able
to say: "What passion hangs these weights upon my tongue? I cannot
speak to her, yet she urged conference. O poor Orlando!"
In the third act Rosalind, dressed as a man, reappeared under the name
of Ganymede, with her cousin Celia, who has changed her name to Aliena.
That disguise made an unpleasant impression on me;--I was so accustomed
already to the female costume which allowed my desires to hope, and
which encouraged me, in a treacherous but seductive error! One becomes
accustomed very quickly to regard his desires as realities on the
strength of the most fleeting appearances, and I became very sombre
when Théodore appeared in his male costume, more sombre than I had been
before; for joy serves only to make grief more bitter, the sun shines
only to make us more fully appreciate the horrors of darkness, and the
cheerful aspect of white has no other object than to bring out all the
melancholy of black.
His coat was the most coquettish and fascinating garment in the world,
of a dainty, fanciful cut, all decked out with knots and ribbons, very
much in the style reflected by the dandies of the court of Louis XIII.;
a pointed hat, with a long curled feather, shaded the curls of his
beautiful hair, and a damascened sword raised the hem of his travelling
cloak.
He was dressed, however, in a way to make one feel that the virile
garments had a feminine lining; something broader at the hips and
fuller at the breast, an indefinable undulation that we do not see in
cloth fitted to a man's body, left but faint doubts as to the sex of
the individual.
His demeanor was half deliberate, half timid, and entertaining to the
last degree, and with infinite skill he made himself appear as ill at
ease in a costume to which he was accustomed, as he had seemed to be
at home in clothes that were not his.
My serenity gradually returned, and I convinced myself anew that he was
really a woman.--I recovered sufficient self-possession to carry out my
rôle properly.
Do you know the play? perhaps not. As I have done nothing but read
and declaim it for a fortnight I know it by heart from beginning to
end, and I cannot realize that everybody is not as familiar as myself
with the plot and the intrigue; it is an error into which I am very
apt to fall, to think that, when I am drunk, everybody else is drunk
and trying to knock down the walls, and if I knew Hebrew, I certainly
should ask my valet for my dressing-gown and slippers in that tongue,
and should be very much surprised if he did not understand me.--You can
read it if you choose; I assume that you have read it and touch only on
those passages that have some connection with my position.
Rosalind, walking in the forest with her cousin, is greatly surprised
to find that the bushes bear, instead of blackberries and wild
plums, madrigals in her praise; strange fruits which luckily are not
accustomed to grow on bramble bushes; for when one is thirsty it is
more satisfactory to find good berries on the branches than bad
sonnets. She is much disturbed to know who has spoiled the bark of the
young trees by carving her initials on them.--Celia, who has already
met Orlando, tells her, after long urging, that the rhymer is no other
than the young man who vanquished Charles the wrestler, the duke's
athlete.
Soon Orlando himself appears and Rosalind enters into conversation with
him by asking him the time.--Surely an extremely simple beginning; one
can imagine nothing more commonplace.--But have no fear; from that
trite, commonplace phrase you will see an unlooked-for crop spring up
of witty conceits, overflowing with curious flowers and comparisons, as
if from the richest and most thoroughly fertilized soil.
After a few lines of sparkling dialogue in which each word, as it
falls upon the phrase, sends out to right and left millions of dancing
sparks, like a hammer falling upon a red hot bar of iron, Rosalind
asks Orlando if by chance he knows the man who hangs odes on hawthorn
bushes and elegies on brambles, and who seems to be afflicted with the
quotidian of love, which she knows how to cure. Orlando confesses that
he is the man who is tortured by love, and as she has boasted of having
several infallible remedies for that disease, begs her to do him the
favor of telling him one.--"You in love?" replies Rosalind, "you have
none of the marks whereby a lover is recognized; you have neither a
lean cheek nor a sunken eye, your hose is not ungartered nor your
sleeve unbuttoned, and your shoe is tied with much grace; if you are in
love with any one, it is certainly with yourself, and you have need of
none of my remedies."
It was not without genuine emotion that I replied in these exact words:
"Fair youth, I would I could make thee believe I love thee."[2]
This reply, so unexpected, so strange, to which nothing leads up and
which seemed to have been written expressly for me as if by a sort
of prevision on the part of the poet, produced a great effect upon
me when I repeated it before Théodore, whose divine lips were still
slightly curled with the ironical expression of the passage he had just
repeated, while his eyes smiled with inexpressible sweetness, and a
bright beam of kindliness gilded all the upper part of his young and
lovely face.
"Me believe it! you may as soon make her that you love believe it;
which, I warrant, she is apter to do than to confess she does; that
is one of the points in which women still give the lie to their
consciences. But, in good sooth, are you he that hangs the verses
on the trees, wherein Rosalind is so admired, and do you truly need
remedies for your madness?"
When she is fully persuaded that it is Orlando himself and no other
who has written the beautiful lines that walk upon so many feet, the
fair Rosalind consents to tell him her remedy. This is the gist of it:
she has pretended to be the lovesick swain's beloved, and compelled
him to pay court to her as to his own mistress; and, to sicken him
of his passion, she gave full sway to the most extravagant caprices;
sometimes she laughed, sometimes she wept; one day she received him
kindly, another day cruelly; she scratched him, she spat in his face;
she was not herself for a single moment; affected, inconstant, prudish,
languorous, she was everything by turns, and whatever ennui, the vapors
and the blue devils can instil in the way of extraordinary whims in
the hollow head of a silly woman, the poor devil must needs endure and
carry out.--An imp, a monkey, and an attorney in conjunction could have
invented no more mischievous tricks.--This miraculous treatment did
not fail to produce its effect;--the patient was driven from his "mad
humor of love to a living humor of madness; which was, to forswear the
full stream of the world, and to live in a nook merely monastic;" a
most satisfactory result and one which might readily be anticipated, by
the way.
Orlando, as you may believe, is little disposed to recover his health
by such means; but Rosalind insists and wishes to undertake the
cure.--And she uttered these words: "I would cure you, if you would
but call me Rosalind, and come every day to my cote and woo me," with
such significant, palpable meaning, and accompanied with such a strange
glance, that it was impossible for me not to attach to them a more
extended significance than that of the words themselves and not to
see therein an indirect warning to declare my real sentiments.--And
when Orlando replied: "With all my heart, good youth," she exclaimed,
with even more significance, and as if annoyed at her failure to make
herself understood: "Nay, you must call me Rosalind."
Perhaps I was mistaken and imagined that I saw what did not really
exist, but it seemed to me that Théodore had noticed my passion,
although you may be sure I have never lisped a word of it, and that,
through the veil of those borrowed expressions, behind that stage-mask,
in those hermaphroditic words, he was alluding to his real sex and to
our reciprocal positions. It is impossible that so bright a woman as
she is, who knows so much of the world as she, should not have detected
from the very first what was going on in my heart:--in default of my
tongue, my eyes and my mental disturbance have spoken loud enough, and
the veil of warm friendship which I had thrown over my love was not so
impenetrable that a watchful and interested observer could not easily
look through it.--The most innocent and least experienced girl on earth
would not have been deceived by it for one moment.
Some important motive, doubtless, which I may not know, compels the
beauty to adopt this infernal disguise, which has been the cause of
all my suffering and has been on the verge of making me a strange
sort of lover: except for that, everything would have run as smoothly
and easily as a carriage whose wheels are well greased, over a level
road covered with fine gravel; I could have abandoned myself in sweet
security to the most amorously vagabond reveries and have taken my
divinity's little soft white hand in mine without shuddering with
horror and recoiling twenty paces as if I had been touched with a
red-hot iron, or felt the claws of Beelzebub in person.
Instead of falling into despair and raging inwardly like a genuine
maniac, of beating my breast because I could not escape remorse, and
lamenting because I had none, I should have said to myself with a
feeling of duty well done and conscience satisfied:--"I am in love!"--a
sentence as agreeable to say to one's self in the morning, under
nice warm bedclothes with your head on a soft pillow, as any other
conceivable sentence of the same length--always excepting this: "I have
money."
After leaving my bed I could have taken my place in front of my mirror,
and there, looking at myself with a sort of respect, I should have been
touched, as I combed my hair, by my poetic pallor, promising myself
that I would turn it to good advantage and make the most of it, for
nothing is so low as to make love with a scarlet face; and when one
has the ill-luck to be red-faced and in love, as may happen, I am of
the opinion that he should have his face powdered every day or else
renounce all idea of gentility in his appearance and turn his attention
to the Margots and Toinons.
Then I could have breakfasted with suitable gravity, in order to
nourish this dear body, this precious casket of passion, to manufacture
with the juice of meats and game, good, amorous chyle and warm, quick
blood, and to maintain it in a condition to give pleasure to charitable
souls.
And after breakfast, as I picked my teeth, I would have tossed together
a few irregular rhymes, by way of sonnet, all in honor of my mistress;
I would have invented a thousand similes, each more novel than the
last, and infinitely gallant; in the first quatrain there would have
been a dance of suns, and in the second a minuet of the cardinal
virtues; the two triplets would have been in equally good taste;
Helen would have been treated as a bar-maid and Paris as an idiot;
the magnificence of the metaphors would have left the Orient nothing
to desire; the last line would have been particularly admirable and
would have contained at least two witty conceits per syllable; for the
poison of the scorpion is in his tail and the merit of the sonnet is
in its last line.--The sonnet completed and well and duly transcribed
upon laid and perfumed paper, I would have gone forth from my house a
hundred cubits tall, bending my head for fear of striking against the
sky and catching on the clouds--a wise precaution--and I would have
declaimed my new production to all my friends and all my enemies, then
to children at the breast and their nurses, then to the horses and
donkeys, then to the walls and trees, to ascertain the opinion of all
creation as to this last product of my vein.
In society I would have talked with women with a dogmatic air, and
upheld sentimental theories in a solemn, measured voice, like a man who
knows much more than he cares to say about the subject in hand, and
who did not learn what he knows from books;--which inevitably produces
a most prodigious effect, and makes all the women in the company who
don't tell their ages and the few young girls who haven't been asked to
dance, gasp for breath like carp stranded on the beach.
I might have led the happiest life imaginable, trodden on the poodle's
tail without too great an outcry from his mistress, overturned small
tables covered with porcelain, and eaten the best bits at table,
leaving none for the rest of the company; it would all have been
forgiven in view of the well-known absentmindedness of lovers; and when
they saw me thus swallowing everything with a terrified mien, everybody
would have clasped his hands and said; "Poor fellow!"
And then, the dreaming, mournful air, the hair in tears, the untidy
stockings, the loose cravat, the long hanging arms I should have had!
how I should have walked about the avenues in the park, now with
great strides, now with short steps, after the manner of a man whose
reason has gone completely astray! How I should have gazed at the moon
between her two eyes, and made circles in the water with the utmost
tranquillity!
But the gods ordered otherwise.
I have fallen in love with a beauty in doublet and boots, a haughty
Bradamante who disdains the garments of her sex and leaves you at times
in the most disquieting uncertainty and perplexity;--her features
and body are the features and body of a woman, but her mind is
incontestably the mind of a man.
My mistress is most expert with the sword and could give lessons
to the most experienced fencing-master; she has fought I know not
how many duels, and killed or wounded three or four persons; in the
saddle she leaps ditches ten feet wide and hunts like an old country
squire:--strange qualities for a mistress! such things never happen to
anybody but me.
I jest, but there certainly is no reason for it, for I have never
suffered so much, and these last two months have seemed to me like two
years, two centuries rather. There has been an inflow and outflow of
uncertainties in my head, well adapted to confuse the strongest brain;
I have been so violently agitated and pulled in every direction, I have
had such frenzied impulses, such deathly prostration, such extravagant
hopes, and such profound despair that I really do not know why it
has not killed me. That idea has engrossed me and filled my thoughts
so completely that I have wondered that it could not be seen clearly
through my body, like a candle in a lantern, and I have been in mortal
fear that some one would discover who was the object of this insensate
passion.--However, Rosette, who is the one person in the world who has
the most interest in watching the movements of my heart, has not seemed
to notice anything; I think that she has been too much absorbed herself
in her love for Théodore to observe my coldness to her; or else I must
be a past-master in the art of dissimulation and I am not conceited
enough to think that.--Théodore himself has never shown until to-day
that he had the slightest suspicion of the state of my mind, and he
has always talked with me in a friendly, familiar way, as a well-bred
young man talks with a young man of his own age--nothing more.--His
conversation with me has touched indifferently upon all sorts of
subjects, art, poetry and other kindred matters; but nothing private or
with a direct reference to him or myself.
Perhaps the motives that forced him to adopt this disguise no longer
exist and he proposes soon to resume his proper attire: that I cannot
say; it is a fact, however, that Rosalind delivered certain sentences
with a significant intonation and emphasized in a very marked way all
those passages in her part which were of ambiguous meaning and could be
twisted in that direction.
In the scene of the rendezvous, from the moment when she reproaches
Orlando for not having arrived two hours earlier, as becomes a genuine
lover, but two hours after, to the dolorous sigh she utters, terrified
at the extent of her passion, as she throws herself into Aliena's arms:
"O coz, coz, coz, my pretty little coz, that thou didst know how many
fathoms deep I am in love!" she displayed miraculous talent. There was
an irresistible mixture of tenderness, melancholy, and love; her voice
trembled with emotion, and behind the laugh one could feel that the
most violent love was ready to explode; add to this all the piquancy
and peculiarity of the transposition, and the novelty of seeing a young
man pay court to his mistress, whom he takes for a man and who has
every appearance of being one.
Expressions which would have seemed ordinary and commonplace enough
under other circumstances, assumed peculiar significance then, and all
the small change of similes and amorous protestations, which is current
on the stage, seemed to have been recoined with new dies; indeed if the
thoughts, instead of being unique and charming as they are, had been as
threadbare as a judge's gown or the saddle-cloth of a hired donkey, the
way in which they were expressed would have made them seem wonderfully
keen and bright and in the best possible taste.
I have forgotten to tell you that Rosette, after declining the rôle of
Rosalind, had good-humoredly undertaken the secondary rôle of Phœbe;
Phœbe is a shepherdess in the forest of Arden, madly loved by the
shepherd Sylvius, whom she cannot endure and whom she treats with
consistent and crushing cruelty. Phœbe is as cold as the moon for whom
she is named; she has a heart of snow that does not melt in the fire
of the most ardent sighs, but whose frozen crust grows thicker and
thicker and becomes as hard as the diamond; but she has no sooner seen
Rosalind in the costume of the comely page, Ganymede, than all that
ice dissolves in tears and the diamond becomes softer than wax. The
haughty Phœbe, who laughed at love, is in love herself; she suffers
now the torments she had inflicted on others. Her pride humbles itself
so far as to make all the advances, and she sends to Rosalind, by
poor Sylvius, a burning letter which contains a declaration of her
passion in most humble and suppliant terms. Rosalind, moved to pity
for Sylvius, and having, moreover, most excellent reasons for not
responding to Phœbe's love, subjects her to the most cruel treatment
and makes sport of her with unparalleled mercilessness and ferocity.
Phœbe prefers these insults, however, to the most touching and most
passionate flattery of her unhappy shepherd; she follows the fair
stranger everywhere and with all her importunity succeeds in extorting
from him nothing but the promise that if he ever marries a woman she
shall surely be the one; meanwhile he urges her to treat Sylvius kindly
and not depend upon a too flattering hope.
Rosette acted her part with a melancholy and caressing grace, a
sorrowful, resigned tone that went to the heart;--and when Rosalind
said to her: "I would love you, if I could," the tears were ready to
overflow, and she could hardly hold them back, for Phœbe's story is
her own, as Orlando's is mine, with this difference, that everything
turns out happily for Orlando, and that Phœbe, disappointed in her
love, is compelled to marry Sylvius instead of the charming ideal
she longed to embrace. Such is life: that which affords happiness to
one necessarily causes another unhappiness. It is very fortunate for
me that Théodore is a woman, it is very unfortunate for Rosette that
he is not a man, and she is now wallowing in the slough of amorous
impossibilities in which I recently went astray.